“Who could know her better than her business partner? Someone she shared a house with, for Christ’s sake?”
She stood, removing the cigarette from the holder and stubbing it out, in what I read as a surprising show of anger from a woman whose face remained cool, pale, impenetrable.
She said, “I didn’t say I didn’t know her. I knew her very well indeed. But I didn’t like her, Mr. Mallory. And you want to put your head on someone’s shoulder and have someone say, ‘There, there,’ and afterward put their head on your shoulder so you can say, ‘There, there,’ and generally be miserable together and purge whatever individual guilt you might feel in a mutual, sloppy show of sentiment, and that’s fine... if you liked her. I didn’t.”
Suddenly I knew something. Or at least thought I did.
“You did once,” I said.
“What?” Her head jerked back, just a little.
“Like her. You liked her once.”
She shrugged. “Sure. We were friendly.” Her fingers searched the desk for her cigarettes, while her eyes looked at me with a cold searching stare. I reached over and pushed the cigarettes, Salems, into the path of her fingers.
“You lived together,” I said.
She sat down. “We lived together, yes.” She lit up again, but without the holder this time.
“Ginnie was an experimenter,” I said. “With people as well as drugs. You were lovers, weren’t you?”
She smoked for a while, deciding whether or not to answer.
Then she said, “We were for a while. But like most gamblers...” The enigmatic smile returned, seeming less enigmatic now. “... eventually she cheated.”
“Who with?”
“Does it matter?”
“Just wondering.”
She laughed mirthlessly, smoke curling out her nostrils, dragonlike. “You’re a nosy little bastard.”
“We all have our little quirks.”
“You’re a nasty little bastard, too.”
“I didn’t mean that to sound nasty,” I said truthfully. “And I’m not shocked, or disapproving of your relationship with Ginnie. I feel a little naive for not figuring it out a long time ago, though.”
She said, meaning to be nasty, I think, “You were born in Iowa, weren’t you?”
“Yeah. There’s no law against it. Some people are born and die here. Ginnie, for instance.”
“It was that jerk she married.”
“What?”
“That’s who she cheated on me with. That hippie jerk she married.”
“She didn’t ever take his last name, did she?”
“No. She was independent, our Ginnie. His name was O’Hara. John O’Hara. The poet, not the novelist.”
“Didn’t he sign his work J.T. O’Hara?”
“That’s right. Didn’t want to be confused with a real writer, I would guess.”
“That’s a little cruel, isn’t it?”
“Have you ever read any of his poetry?”
Actually, I had; but she still struck me as cruel, grain of truth in it or not.
I said, “I understand Ginnie’s daughter’s living with O’Hara.”
She nodded. Then she smirked to herself, reflecting. “Her most recent romantic conquest was Iowa City’s resident media guru.”
“David Flater,” I said, nodding. “Ginnie mentioned him to me when I saw her last.”
“Ginnie used people,” she said. Finally opening up. “She used me. I was a business major, getting top grades. But I ran in what you might call counter-culture circles. I found approval with Ginnie, J.T., the rest of them. The last gasp of the hippie generation. Ha. But I knew this college life was... fleeting. And I feared the approval of Ginnie and the others would be something I wouldn’t find out there, in the... real world. Some of my personal habits might’ve gotten in the way when I went to find a job in the straight world, I thought — wrongly, I now believe. I could’ve adjusted. With my brains, my ambition, my skills, my talent, I could’ve made it anywhere.”
What this woman needed was a little self-confidence.
“But Ginnie seduced me, in more ways than one. I came in, here at ETC.’s, as her business associate, a glorified bookkeeper, really. Then when my father died and I inherited some money, she gave me the glorious opportunity to buy into this little gold mine. Ha! I didn’t know she’d been on her good behavior that first year — that before I came aboard, she’d salted away enough fun money to hold her awhile. It was later I found how she’d pull money out of the business on a whim — to go to Vegas, to play the market, even here in the store to buy some line of goods that she figured would take off...”
“Wasn’t she pretty smart about that sort of thing? I remember she was the first to show Tiffany-style lamp shades around here, and before that turquoise jewelry... she must’ve made a mint at both—”
She shrugged, granting me that. “But she just as often struck out. She bought a truckload of pink flamingoes, a few years ago, because it was a kitsch sort of thing; she figured that John Waters cult movie and the new-wave influence and all that would hit here and make those plastic birds the talk of the town. We ended up having to dump ’em to a flea market merchant at an eighty percent loss. Iowa City doesn’t know kitsch from a kitchen sink. This town’s hipper than Port City, but SoHo it ain’t.”
“So you bought her out. Two months ago?” Ginnie had mentioned, at our high school reunion last month, that her partner Caroline Westin had taken over the business.
And right now Caroline Westin was smiling, a flared-nostril sort of smile that didn’t have anything to do with good humor. “You’re goddamn right I bought her out two months ago. With what was left of my inheritance, and what I’d saved and made investing from my own share of this place. I wanted her out of here. First thing I did was move out that goddamn head shop crap. That’s yesterday, and it’s dangerous, besides.”
“Too much local legislation against selling drug paraphernalia, you mean.”
“That’s right, and it’s lousy for the image. We have college-kid clientele here, certainly, but mostly it’s grad students and teachers and lawyers and doctors and professional people in general — yesterday, this place served Yippies. We’re into Yuppies now. Got it?”
“Got it.”
“It’s not that some of our clientele aren’t into drugs. I’m sure some marijuana is still being smoked, and some cocaine is certainly being snorted. But they don’t buy their furniture, or their Kamali clothes, or their goddamn pasta, at the same place they purchase rolling papers and coke mirrors.”
“Was Ginnie still dealing dope?”
Her pale face went suddenly paler. Her mouth a slash, her eyes stones. “No drug dealing’s been connected to ETC., ETC., ETC., ever.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
She stood up. “Why don’t you leave?”
I smiled, gestured in a peacemaking way. “Look, I just—”
She didn’t return the smile. She just pointed at the door; Uncle Sam wants you — to leave.
I left.
And this time the guy behind the counter didn’t smile at me, either.
4
A warm breeze riffled the foliage, sun hiding under some clouds, as I strolled down the plaza of planters and railroad-tie benches and boutiques and trendy cafes, and on the lefthand corner, just as I reached what had once been the intersection where that modern-art sculpture remained stalled, I came to a massive new brown-brick office building, Plaza Centre One. One of its street level shops was filled with yellow and gold merchandise hawking the Hawks, shirts and shoes and caps, usually featuring the U. of Iowa’s cartoon mascot, Herky; back in Ginnie’s day interest in sports was at its low ebb around here — “Hell no, we won’t go!” was one of many battle cries. Now it was, “How ’bout them Hawks!” A copy center and a travel agency flanked the doors as I went in the Centre (which I supposed was much the same as a center), into a stark, modern lobby where silver cylindrical light fixtures hovered like futuristic upside-down ashtrays stuck to the ceiling. I stood studying the building directory, thinking absently that I’d never before been in a high-class office building that smelled quite like this one. As I stood waiting at the bright red elevators, I saw why: tucked back in the corner of this high-tech lobby was the wide counter of a Hardee’s fast-food outlet, at the moment dispensing early lunch to an odd mix of students and businessmen. This seemed to me a better symbol of Iowa City than Herky the Hawk.